


We Might One Day Have Hover Cars. Kale Might Be Poisonous.

by easyforpauline



Series: an early name used for videophones [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Banter, Begging, Blindfolds, Degradation, Dirty Talk, Discussion of abuse/kidnapping/brainwashing fantasies, Dom/sub, Domestic, Face Slapping, Hair-pulling, Humiliation, Impact Play, M/M, Manhandling, Marking, Objectification, Oral Sex, Orgasm Control, Painplay, Scratching, Stone Top, crawling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-03 09:49:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8707675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easyforpauline/pseuds/easyforpauline
Summary: Like an episode of Chopped if Chopped were about Bucky getting fucked instead of about cooking or timed competitions.





	

**Author's Note:**

> "Abuse/kidnapping/brainwashing fantasies" more clearly explained in the end notes.

The text Steve sends as Bucky’s comparing the blurbs on the backs of two different vampire romance novels just has a pair of coordinates, followed by a question mark. Cradling the books in the crook of his left arm, Bucky looks up the location, and texts back, _I can be there in thirty._ He follows it up with, _Hang on u do want me to actually go there, right?_  

Steve sends, _Yes. No rush_ , and an emoji of a little running guy.

Bucky adds both vampire books to the haul in his basket. A few days ago at work, sitting on his desk while she drank her coffee, Hailey the Intern mentioned, _Y’know, back when every heroine was trying to marry a vampire_ , and he nodded like he knew what she was talking about and said, “Too bad that ended.”

It is too bad, but now he has a list of titles on a long curl of receipt paper folded in his wallet, and he’s having fun checking them off out of order. Except when his heart starts slicing itself into anxious slivers and feeding them to his gut like table scraps just because he looked at the list in the wrong frame of mind and thought too hard about checking them off _out of order_.

More than anything, he’s having fun, and his basket now contains list items seven and fifteen.

He’s at the coordinates thirty-six minutes later. They’re for a wide row house on the corner, a couple blocks from where he gets off the subway, and Steve is sitting on the lowest step behind the gate.

“How was the library?”

Grinning, Bucky swings his backpack off his shoulder and hands it over to Steve by one padded strap. “How do you think?”

Steve lifts and lowers the backpack. Like it’s a melon he’s thinking of buying. He raises his eyebrows at Bucky, tilting his head to the side. “What, is this supposed to be heavy?”

“No, it’s supposed to be a jackelope.” He punches the bag at nowhere near his full strength, so that it knocks against Steve’s stomach. “Guess how many books are in there.”

“Books? I’m not guessing how many jelly beans?”

“Fine, there’s fifteen books. Three are for you.”

Steve’s mouth twitches, and he blinks one eye at Bucky. “Oh, I rate a whole three?”

“You were supposed to rate a whole four.” He reaches to take his bag. In response, Steve steps back, and holds it above his head. Bucky rolls his eyes at him, swiping at the dangling bag with his right hand. Not actually trying to knock it down. “ _But_ one wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I’ll find it later.”

He bats at the bag again, and Steve starts walking backward up the steps. Instead of following after, Bucky gives him a pleading look. Or what he thinks is probably a pleading look, widening his eyes and furrowing his brow at the same time, frowning.

Steve stares down at him, feigning cool detachment. Then he smiles, laughs, and throws the bag down for Bucky to catch one-handed. “Do I get to know what the book you couldn’t find was?”

“You don’t.” Bucky slips both arms through the straps. Grips them with his hands and rocks back and forth. “It’s a surprise.” Now he follows Steve up the steps, turning his attention back to the building.

Blue curtains obscure the view through the door’s windows, and through the other windows too. Anyway, they’re all grimy and smeared, and when Bucky kicks at the lip of the top step, to the far right of where Steve’s looming over him, it crumbles. Red dust gets on his boots, and he hops up next to Steve, leans against the railing, and sees that the door, at least, has a fresh coat of paint.

He turns back to Steve, who’s been patiently watching him. “What is this place? _Don’t_ say it’s also a surprise, come on.”

“But it _is_ a surprise _._ And it’s Gerry’s Gym. Finest gym in a two-block radius.”

Bucky looks higher up and sees that it does, in fact, say _Gerry’s Gym_ in mostly faded and peeling gold letters above the door. “What, so you wanted a gym buddy?” Neither of them are dressed for it, though Steve could at least have a change of clothes inside. Bucky’s in jeans and a sweater. Clompy boots. He can spot for Steve, sure, but there’s no way Steve would ever ask for a spotter.

“In a sense.” Steve takes Bucky’s left wrist in his hand and tugs. The way he does it, it’s almost a question. Bucky steps closer to show his acquiescence, and then Steve’s hauling them both inside. Still holding on, he fumbles in his pocket, takes out a ring of keys, and locks the door behind them.

“Oh, perfect,” Bucky says. “You have _keys_. This all seems very legal. I’m not living in fear of headlines crying out for the head of the Gerry’s Gym Key Thief.”

Steve lets the keys clatter to the floor. He lets Bucky’s wrist drop too, in favor of draping his forearms chastely over Bucky’s shoulders. Like the first dance at a wedding.

“We’ve gotten enough bad press for a lifetime,” Bucky says, even as he’s moving his hands to Steve’s hips.

“You can relax. I actually own the building.” It’s obvious he’s trying to say it off-hand— _Oh, no big deal; I just own an entire building; oh, yeah, I have twenty-five servants and one’s only job is to make me fruit salad on Thursdays_ —but it doesn’t work. His eyes are too intense and his mouth won’t stop twitching.

Bucky turns his head and noses at the arm on his right shoulder. He gets Steve in the sensitive crook of his elbow, and Steve jumps, but doesn’t move away. In fact, he moves closer, and clasps his hands together at the nape of Bucky’s neck. Testing, Bucky stretches his head back; Steve’s grip doesn’t ease at the pressure.

“Since when the hell do you own a building? Since when the hell do you own _a gym_ , He-Man?”

“Week and a half. I thought it could be a fun surprise. Having all this to ourselves.” He comes even closer, bending his elbows so his hands stay where they are, and licks along Bucky’s hairline. Bucky scrunches his face up, but doesn’t complain. Not about that.

“Are you kidding me?” Steve stops licking and meets his eyes. “You’re not my sugar daddy, Steve. Don’t start buying buildings just to fuck me in.”

“Correction: I bought _both_ of us a building just to fuck you in. I’m no one’s sugar daddy.”

“But you are a frivolous capitalist pig.”

“Yes.” He bites the soft jut of Bucky’s nose. “Are you mad at me?”

“No. I think you’re insane, but when weren’t you?”

Steve says, “Fair enough,” and kisses his cheekbone. “I checked the security before you got here. It’s empty. All exits are thoroughly sealed. But if you wanna check too—”

“No. No, I trust you on that. You got any measures in place?”

“Windows alarmed. Plenty of tripwires.”

“Good man. Then I’m good. Good to go for whatever the fuck this is.”

“Okay, I mean—I don’t need you to be good to go right now. It could also be fun if you know it’s here and it’s hanging over your head. We can come back.”

“I said that I’m good to go.” Because now he knows why Steve hasn’t fucked him in a week and a half. Because he’s been busy focusing on setting up tripwires in his special run-down sex gym.

“Well, say it again.”

He huffs. “I’m good to go, Steve.”

“Say it ten more times.”

Once when they were, well, who knows? Twenty-two? A different age than they are now, Steve made him say tongue twisters while he fucked into him with the handle of a hairbrush, and every time he fucked one up, Steve stopped moving the brush and grabbed Bucky’s face in one hand and squeezed his cheeks together and said, “It’s not fucking _hard,_ Buck. Just do it correctly. She. Sells. Sea. Shells,” his enunciation shockingly pristine, like he was telling the weather.

So Bucky assumes he’s not kidding. He gives himself a second to bite his tongue with one sharp incisor and put his hands in his pockets, and then: “I’m good to go, Steve. I’m good to go, Steve. I’m good to go, Steve. I’m good to—”

“Jesus, cut that shit out. It’s like nails on a chalkboard. Of course you’re good to go. Little sluts like you are always good to go, huh?” He chucks Bucky under the chin, and Bucky purses his lips at him.

Steve kisses his pursed lips. Bucky doesn’t kiss back at first, but when he does, he’s messy about it, licking all of Steve’s mouth that he can reach, until the kiss turns into Steve smiling against his skin, their lips barely overlapping. For a moment, that’s all that happens; Steve smiles, and laughs, in a silent breathy way, and it makes Bucky smile too, and let out an almost chirping pleased sound.

At that, Steve steps away. “Take off your backpack and go stand over there.” He motions with his head and a swinging arm. “In front of that door, centered between it and the opposite wall. Close your eyes. Face whatever way you want. Clear?”

He says, “Mission parameters clearly defined,” in an exaggerated robot voice. He drops his bag by the door and walks over to the spot with jerky robot motions too.

Moving at a normal pace in the same direction, Steve laps him quickly, and gives a light shove to his shoulder as he goes. He mutters, “ _Such_ a fucking geek, Bucky, Jesus,” not looking at Bucky, because it would be clear on his face that he finds this charming. He’s specifically said before that he thinks it’s charming. Right now, what he says is, “I’ll be right back.” And he rounds the corner just as Bucky pulls up to his destination.

He centers himself exactly, even though Steve won’t be able to tell with the same precision that he can. There’s a certain, simple lightness in his heavy shoulders, knowing that he did it right, and he closes his eyes and basks in that. With no instructions about what to do with his hands, he ends up fussing with his hair as he waits. He twists chunks into little ponytails around his head, and his hair is thick, and buoyed by dried sweat—his sweater’s too warm for this weather—so it stays like that on its own until he hears Steve returning and musses it all away.

“It’s still sticking up, y’know,” Steve says.

“All the better to grab me with, then.”

“You could _try_ to look presentable for me.”

Bucky shrugs. He puts his hands in his hair again, finger-combing and flattening, and then Steve’s there, holding both of his wrists in one hand, high over their heads.

“Nope. Too late,” Steve says. “Should have tried sooner.” He lets go, and Bucky keeps his hands where they are. It’s painless right now, but he can feel the shuddering space in his left shoulder where the ache will bloom if he stays that way too long. And Steve knows this, and says, “Lower them, please,” and Bucky obeys. He flexes his hands by his sides.

This earns him a close-mouthed kiss. A fast, soft pressure and sharp sound.

Then Steve says, “We’re playing a game.”

He sounds perfectly casual, like this is a regular Friday night poker game. Like it’s a _given_ that they’re playing a game, and he’s only bringing it up for ritual effect. Or maybe because Bucky’s too stupid to follow along. Bucky smiles. Swallows.

“What, like Parcheesi? Clue? Actually, if it’s not Clue, do you want to play Clue later? Eyes open or closed. I’m easy.”

The first time they played Clue, Bucky said, “This is the best thing to ever happen to me,” and Steve said, “Oh, thanks,” and Bucky shushed him and said, “I’m trying to play Clue.”

“Maybe. Ask me later.” He smooths his hand over Bucky’s face, fingers a sweeping pressure across his eyelids, palm caressing his mouth and nose. Gone too soon. “No, not a board game. Today we’re having a cooking show.” A firm object nudges at the back of his left hand. “Palm,” Steve mutters.

He turns his palm outward, and wraps his fingers around the object. Lets it slide through his fist and finds that he’s holding a thick, flat arc, and it feels different in this one than it does in the right, but he spent a long time touching with both when he was shopping. When you want something to be perfect, you use every evaluative tool available.

 “You—Oh my god. You asshole, you hung onto that shit so long I thought you lost interest. I was gonna start demanding you give it back.”

The rest of the basket feels even better, he knows, with its mess of divots and checkerboard of slightly contrasting textures. As though telepathic, Steve lets it knock against his leg. Its full weight. Everything he stocked it with is still inside. Ready to go.

Steve says, “Nope.”

“You fucking asshole.” He says it with nothing but admiration this time, but now Steve is on him, behind him, twisting his right arm behind his back and between his shoulder blades, grip steely on his wrist, winding his other arm around Bucky’s hips and pulling him close. The basket is somewhere else now. He missed its thud to the floor.

“You might want to be a little nicer to me, Buck. You’re on TV right now, and you don’t want the people at home to see what happens when I have to get firm with you, huh?”

“Oh. I don’t?”

“You tell me. You want to know that some nice couple is in their living room, watching the set, holding hands and laughing while I grind your face into the floor?”

Bucky whines at a low volume and moves his mouth side to side. He laughs once. His heart is full. The nice couple is watching him on their wedding night, he bets. They’re gonna joke about how pathetic he is while they fuck for the first time. Maybe they’ll do impressions. “It’s a good question,” he says. “What are their names?”

“Their names. Are. Cordial and Hancock.”

“ _What_?” Bucky can’t help giggling, shaking, vibrating in Steve’s arms, against the firmness of Steve’s big chest, movement making him achingly aware of the strain in his elbow where he’s all twisted up.

“Their names are Cordial and Hancock, and they’re going to watch me beat your ass and stick my fist down your throat if you aren’t good and patient. They have a cat.”

“You’re fucking out of control.”

“I’m fucking you out of control? I hope.”

“Please let me kiss you right now.” His voice gets thready and lisping on the word “kiss.” He isn’t sure anything he said was intelligible.

But Steve says, “Real quick. Keep your arm where it is,” and spins him so their chests are together. Bucky is good and patient and keeps his arm twisted and painful behind him. “Go ahead then. Kiss me.”

With his eyes closed, he doesn’t quite hit the mark. His lips drag from the flare of Steve’s nostril down to the parted softness of his mouth, and then he kisses him, careful. A tongueless kiss that makes small suction cup sounds. Feeling the thinness of the skin on Steve’s lips, the delicacy of him.

And then delicate Steve bites his bottom lip, vicious and sudden enough that Bucky somewhere between moans and screams, his mind blanking, and he almost forgets to hold his arm behind his back as he sinks into Steve’s delicate, giant solidity.

“There, there,” Steve whispers, before biting down on Bucky’s lip again, in the same place, and Bucky knows he sounds like a wounded dog, and his eyes feel wet and stinging. A promise. This is all going to hurt.

Steve stops biting, and runs his tongue over where it’s sore and sensitive, and Bucky opens his mouth for Steve, if Steve wants to put his tongue inside. It’s okay if he doesn’t.

It seems like he doesn’t. He pulls away and says, “Turn back around now. You’ve been kissed enough.”

“Thank you,” Bucky says, and turns. “So when’s the game begin?”

“Don’t you know anything about TV? We’ve gotta get through the news reel and cartoon first.”

“I know you say things like that just to hurt me.” The news reel and cartoon used to be the only part of movies Steve truly liked. And it’s not like Bucky doesn’t love cartoons, but there’s no harm in exercising your attention span, or crying into the sleeve of your jacket when the music swells, instead of fidgeting and looking like you’d rather be dead than get caught being overwhelmed in public.

Steve used to spend movies alternating between stuffing his face and resting his forehead on Bucky’s shoulder in the dark.

“’Course I do. Only the best for a man’s best friend.” Steve gets up close with him, crossing his arms over Bucky’s chest like a straitjacket, holding him in place, Bucky’s bent-back arm an awkward protuberance between their bodies. His knuckles are aligned with his own spine; his palm covers Steve’s steady heart. “Stay.” He squeezes especially hard, and then he’s gone.

Well, and then he’s a foot and a half to the right, but Bucky’s body registers, like scraped skin, the sudden absence of shared heat and pressure. He moans, high and breathy and licks at his own chin for a second. Reels himself in.

Steve says, “Yeah, hold your horses. I’ll be back for you. Just seeing what we have here.”

“You didn’t open it up already? You know I said you could.”

“No, I’ve looked. I’m just looking again. If I can bear to look at your ugly face several times a day all these years, there’s no harm in looking in a basket twice.”

Bucky shuffles around, unable to stop himself from grinning. “You can bear it?”

“Just barely. You’re a sight that causes sore eyes.”

“Huh. I guess _that’s_ why I’m on all those government watch lists.”

“What, because you’re hard to watch? It takes a professional?”

“You got it. Brilliant joke-dissection there.”

“Good thing I’m here to keep you in line, then. Okay.” He grunts and comes back over, standing in front of Bucky this time. “Here we go.”

A soft, thick strand of material wraps around Bucky’s head, covering his eyes and a sliver each of his forehead and the bridge of his nose. The gauze. Then a thinner material wraps around that, making several circuits, encasing almost the whole of the gauze, and when Steve steps back, he orders him, “Shake your head from side to side.”

Bucky does, and the gauze stays, held in firmly in place by the electrical tape. “Thrifty,” he says, opening his eyes. No light at all, and so much pressure on his face. He sticks his tongue out and draws it back in. “I think I’d be a pretty slick mummy. You think about gauzing up my whole face?”

“Thought about it. Wanted to hear your dumb mouth. Speaking of which!” He pecks two fingers against the seam of Bucky’s lips so Bucky will open. His reward is a stick of minty gum sliding in. “Close. Chew.”

When he put the gum in the basket, he worried, for a moment, about the possibility of Steve getting it in his hair. Not meaning to, but deciding to spit it at his face and fucking up the aim. But he decided the likelihood was low enough not to matter, and anyway, a snazzy new haircut was hardly a terrible price to pay for getting fucked out of his mind.

Steve’s behind him again, one hand petting at his hip, the other holding his hand where it’s twisted up behind his back. Fingers interlacing lazily.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel like I’m chewing gum and you’re holding my hand.”

“Emotionally, Bucky. What’s your emotional landscape?” He says this last bit like a magician showing off the rabbit in his hat. Could Steve pull him out of a hat? Hold him by his ears in front of an applauding crowd?

“ _Emotional landscape?_ Oh my god.” He can’t stop laughing. “Fuck.”

“Shut up! What is it? How are you feeling?”

His laughter subsides the tiniest bit. “I told you. I feel like I’m chewing gum and you’re holding my hand.”

Steve grunts. “Fine. I’ll accept it as an answer.” He gives Bucky’s hand another extra-hard squeeze. He kisses the back of his head. “For now. You’re lucky I’m so forgiving.” His hand, on Bucky’s, becomes limper.  

There’s a silence. Bucky wants to say, _Aren’t I?_ as cavalier as anything, but. Sometimes Steve will say that and there’s no problem; other times talking about forgiving Bucky, no matter how lighthearted, makes him lose the thread of things and freeze up. 

Bucky says, “Hey, you can rewind and pretend you didn’t say that. I don’t mind but—”

It’s been a long time since he’s asked if Steve would ever forgive him for everything.  Each time, Steve insisted there was nothing to forgive. And Bucky dropped it. Bucky’s chosen not to ask for absolution, because Steve gets soft and worried when it seems like he might. And because, these days, he understands why.

He asked Steve about it after the first time he froze up, and Steve said, "I  _know_ it's irrational, okay? I don't know," and Bucky said, "Come on, who's not irrational? Be irrational all you like." 

He both hears and feels when Steve stops holding his breath. “Okay. Rewind.” He re-tightens his hold on Bucky’s hand. Bucky makes a whirring noise. “You’re lucky I tolerate your dumb ass.”

“Aren’t I?” He tilts back a little, testing the surety of Steve’s body. Steve hums and removes his hand from Bucky’s hip. Paper crinkles, and another stick of gum slides between his lips. Like feeding a dollar into a vending machine. Bucky kisses Steve’s fingers before they’re gone.

“Chew.” And Bucky chews. Sweet and mint and repetitive action. The hip-petting starts again. He feels like he’s getting chewed up too, loosening, willing his muscles to go gelatinous instead of maintaining their hypervigilant tension. It’s easier with Steve’s own hypervigilant muscles there, keeping watch but hopefully loosening soon too.

“Don’t you wonder what I’m gonna do to you?” Steve asks.

He ducks to kiss the back of Bucky’s neck, some longer hairs at his nape interrupting and tickling across his skin with the motion of Steve’s mouth. Bucky shivers. Steve latches on, and Bucky freezes, forgetting to chew, breathing in through his nose. Steve’s teeth sink in harder. Holding him still. Like he’s a stuffed animal prize and Steve’s a crane machine.

He moans, and Steve stops. Licks where he’s bitten and straightens back up.

Bucky tries to start chewing again, but pauses to say, “I do assume I’m gonna find out soon.”

Steve grabs those overgrown hairs at his neck and yanks, and instinctively, Bucky jerks against the hold, blinking fast, which makes Steve let go and switch to cuffing him on the back of the head. Bucky says, “Ow,” and Steve does it again, harder.

He says, “Don’t get smart with me. Have more gum.”

He has more gum. More mint, more of a rubbery wad forming. He flexes the hand that Steve’s holding, and Steve strokes his heart line with his calloused thumb. Steve’s other arm moves to wrap around his stomach, to hold him tight where he’s grown softer with inactivity. Tight enough to edge into pain. To trick him, if he doesn’t focus, into thinking he can’t breathe right.

He’s secure, and he chews, and Steve says, “Maybe I won’t do anything to you. Maybe I’ll leave you to stand here all day chewing gum until your jaw hurts like someone’s been abusing your mouth for hours. But it’s just you. Wrecking your mouth ‘cause I told you too, huh? Freshening up your disgusting breath for me, but I won’t even kiss you. I’ll just stand ten feet away—” he grips Bucky’s hip sudden and hard enough that it _burns_ , that the skin lights up and throbs—“and eat a snack and laugh at you.”

He’s not gripping anymore, but Bucky’s hip throbs all the same. He says, “Good fucking golly, I like you.”

“You’re saying that still, I must be doing something wrong.”

“I always like you.”

“Oh yeah? So you’re saying I’m always doing something wrong, Buck?”

“No!” He wishes Steve were standing in front of him, that he could butt their foreheads together, but Steve behind him and breathing hotly on the back of his neck would be hard to give up.

“And now you’re contradicting me?”

“Just checking: So’s there anything I can say without getting in trouble?”

“Nope.”

He says in Russian, “You’re my favorite asshole,” and Steve tugs on his hair and lets go in such quick succession that he makes an undignified series of squeaks before he has any idea what’s happening, blinking rapidly. Steve laughs and does it to him again, with a different section of hair, and he can’t stop himself from making even sadder noises.

Then Steve’s letting go of his hand and circling around to his front. He leans his forehead against Bucky’s, and Bucky smiles and takes a deep breath, wishing he could go straight through and be totally contained by Steve’s bulk, like a ghost, just floating there perfectly at the center of him.

Steve says, “You know why you can’t say anything without getting in trouble?”

“Because you said so?”

“Yeah. But incorrect.” One hand creeps up beneath the hems of Bucky’s sweater and undershirt, and Steve intersperses his next words with harsh scratches that make Bucky hush up and stand straighter and want to fall limply against Steve. “It’s because. You aren’t. Supposed. To be talking.” I _believe—_ ” A fingertip on his other hand draws an arc down Bucky’s stubbly cheek, hooking up to prod at his lips—“That I told you to chew. Didn’t I tell you to chew?”

His stomach is sore and alive now, and Steve’s hand is still under there, patting the scratches. “I’m sorry.” He swallows and tries to get his breathing together. “I forgot I’m too dumb to talk and chew gum at the same time.” Bucky bats with his tongue at the wad of gum he has tucked away, pushing at it so his cheek bulges more. Steve’s finger moves to poke the bulge in light, bouncing touches.

“Hmm. I think you should always have something stuffed in here, don’t you? Keep you busy and useful so you don’t mouth off so much.”

Bucky pushes the wad closer to Steve’s fingers, registering the stretch of skin around the rest of his mouth, and a dull ache in his teeth. Steve gets his fingernails in the mix, trying to pinch the gum like Bucky’s cheek is just the wrapper it’s stuck inside. Bucky folds, and hurries the wad away with his tongue, but Steve stays latched, burying hot crescent moons in Bucky’s flesh, holding him too still to talk coherently.

There’s a moment of quiet and stillness, when maybe Steve is smiling at him, at where he’s hurting, or maybe looking at him with disgust like he’s ready to spit on him, or hopefully both. Then he lets go, and grazes his thumb over the spot, smooth and careful. Crinkling metallic paper, sharp scent of mint. He pecks his fingers against Bucky’s lips again, and Bucky opens for more gum.  
  
Steve says, “Close. Chew. And I mean, ‘Chew,’ not, ‘Speak.’ I don’t know how you got your commands so mixed up. All that money down the drain on obedience school.”

Chewing, treasuring how the new stick is still sweet and firm and not a chore, Bucky raises his left arm toward him, moving his fingers in the air like he’s typing: a question. And Steve takes his hand and puts it over his own bicep, where Bucky can tap out in Morse, _Just dumb, I guess._

Steve says, “Yeah. Must be that.” And squeezes Bucky’s wrist. And Bucky squeezes his bicep back. His hand is moved for him, down to his side, and he finds Steve’s hand on his face again, on the other cheek, and his breath is close, all over him. Minty too.

Steve says, “You don’t think chewing’s too hard for you, do you, Buck?” Gum-generated spit makes his voice slippery at the edges. Bucky shakes his head. “You sure about that? ’Cause it looks to me like you’re slowing down again. After I just _told you_ to be good.”

Bucky grunts and chews with renewed fervor, and Steve sighs against Bucky’s face. “Look, man, if you need me to, I’ll chew for you, all right? Manually. I can take your jaw—” At this, he clamps one hand under Bucky’s chin, fingers spread to hold him still, and covers his mouth with the other hand, pressing up into his nose so his breath is faint— “and I can move it up and down. Do you want that?”

Bucky hesitates. In theory, he wants the sensation. In reality, he wants to be good while he can. He moves his head side-to-side enough for Steve to feel against his hands.

“Okay then.” Steve lets him go, but stays close, and Bucky gets to chewing, making an involuntary high noise at the twin pangs in his teeth and mandible. Saliva slips out his mouth when he parts his lips to stretch his jaw further, and he presses them together to stop any more escaping.

Steve wipes at the drool with the back of his hand. “That’s good. I don’t want to ask too much, but if a horse can do it, I don’t see why you can’t. You want to be a good grazing animal for me, don’t you?”

Bucky says, “Neigh,” and grins. More drool escapes, and he makes himself smile smaller, but not much smaller.

Steve slides his hand into Bucky’s hair, palms the back of his skull, and grips and pulls hard. Bucky’s startled out of chewing, has to breathe slowly through his nose to settle back into it. Steve says in his ear, “Which way was that spelled, smartass?”

Bucky says, “Hang on. Am I a horse or an ass?” and regrets it as he’s saying it.

“Stop chewing so you don’t bite yourself.”

Bucky stops chewing and keeps himself loose. Steve slaps him in the face. Bucky’s grin spreads like it’s melting, getting all over him. Steve slaps him again on the other side, and Bucky tilts his head back. Flushed and reprimanded and fluttery. A hot jolt of need zips straight down through him to his dick.

In a small voice, he says, “E-I-G-H,” and tries not to buck his hips toward Steve.

“Oh, good. Then I won’t hit you again right now.” He kisses Bucky’s cheek; his lips are dry, but then he pokes his tongue out. It slithers slowly up Bucky’s face before Steve backs off.

“I’m not crying yet, you know. Nothing to taste.”

“Well, enjoy that while it lasts.”

Bucky smiles at him. Crinkling paper, mint, fingers at his lips, and he groans and uses his tongue to fold the stiff stick in with the rest. Something else to focus on but the growing soreness in his jaw: Steve’s hands at his waistband, unbuckling his belt, unbuttoning, unzipping.

Steve mutters, “Someone’s overdressed,” and Bucky nods and also _mm_ - _hmm_ s in case Steve isn’t looking at him. Keeps chewing and keeps his hands out of the way as Steve shoves his jeans and underwear down for him until they’re stopped by the tops of his boots. Freed, his hard dick brushes against the whispery soft fuzz of his sweater, and he pauses chewing to inhale deep and bite his lip.

Steve pays him no mind. He unlaces Bucky’s boots, pulling the tongues out until they’re disturbingly loose around his calves. He taps on the toe of the left boot. “Let me get all this nonsense off.” Obediently, Bucky lifts each foot off the ground in turn so that Steve can untangle him from his jeans, his underwear, his boots, leaving him in socks and an undershirt and a sweater.

From the sound of it, he tosses it all far down the hall. The hard thump of his boots and the jangle of the knife and keys in his pockets. Steve straightens up then, leaning in close to Bucky’s face, but keeping far enough away that he makes no contact with his dick.

Steve says, “You’re chewing awfully slow there, Buck. Are you really that tired _already_?”

Bucky shrugs, the answer being, _Fuck you, yes, obviously._ Maybe he isn’t crying, but he feels like he might soon, blinking it off, his jaw protesting with every open-and-close. He smiles and tries to look apologetic. “Guess I didn’t have a big enough breakfast.”

Steve says, “Well, if that’s really the best you can do, I guess I _won’t_ enter you for the Guinness Book of Records.”

“Aw, you thought I could break a record?” The fact is, they’ve both already been in there. Printed in the first edition, ostensibly posthumous honors. They’ve got the pages hanging in the living room because Bucky thinks they’re hilarious and Steve thinks they’re ridiculous and likes to throw darts at his.

“I know, right? Clearly I picked the wrong one. Open your mouth.”

He does, and Steve’s finger and thumb push inside, tasting dirty and metallic. He holds them there for a moment, and Bucky keeps his mouth wide, even as he never wants to exercise his jaw again.

“Sluttiest fucking mouth, maybe,” Steve says. “Wonder if there’s a record for that. Oh, here we go.” He grabs the gum, and tugs it loose from Bucky’s teeth, and draws it out from between his lips, trailing drool down his chin.

Steve picks up Bucky’s right hand and places the gum in his palm before perfunctorily wiping his own spit-wet hand off on the side of Bucky’s neck. Then he curls Bucky’s fingers in so the tips touch the gum. It feels like a slug or a slab of raw meat, squishing and sliding under his nails.  
  
Voice low, Steve says, “You feel that? That’s disgusting. That came out of you. That was _inside_ of you.”

Bucky tilts his head back, clenching his eyes shut and clenching his hand around the gum at the same time. It’s awful and moist and if he holds it too long, it’ll dry out and stick to his hand. Maybe Steve will make him try to get it off with his teeth. Then when it doesn’t work all the way, he’ll wash it off for him, with small, careful motions, scolding him the whole time for not doing a better job.

And Steve does say, “You hold onto that for me, sweetheart. I want you to remember how fucking repulsive you are.” It’s gonna get stuck for sure.

Bucky says, “Aww. You really like me.”

“Jesus.” He gets slapped across the face again, hard. Three times in a row, all on the same side, and his eyes are wet and he’s tensing and gasping for breath more intently than he needs to, like a flailing fish, and bubbling over into laughter with that.

“You _really, really_ like me.”

“ _Like_ I said: I tolerate you.” He pushes the heel of his hand into the heated flesh where he smacked him. Grinding at the bone, forcing Bucky’s cheek between his own back teeth. Bucky blinks beneath the gauze, his eyelashes making shuffling sounds, and his eyes are even wetter. Already.

Bucky echoes, “Jesus,” turning into the hand, lacking the freedom of movement, with how firm it is against him, to properly nuzzle at it, but trying to imply nuzzling, at least. “You’re so fucking fantastic. How the fuck did you get so fantastic?”

“Science. Crack a history book some time.”

“What? No, it’s fucking _you_. You, my fantastic fucking—” and Steve slaps the hand over his mouth and shoves him against a wall. Muscle memory stops Bucky from stumbling as he goes. There, Steve takes the hand not gagging him and slides it between Bucky’s back and the drywall, and rubs his forefinger in a circle over Bucky’s spine, asking.  
  
The impact jolted him, and he can feel a spot in his upper back where he took the brunt of it, but it’s a bruise, not a muscle issue. Steve worries about that stuff too much. He nods. Steve keeps his hand back there, but moves from covering his mouth to gripping him around the throat. He feels like a leaf pressed between the pages of a book, left to be beautiful and safe.

Steve whispers in his ear, “Keep holding onto that gum, okay?” and Bucky nods at that too. Steve shifts so his breath is heavy on Bucky’s face when he keeps talking. “Your ‘fantastic’ what, huh? What am I?”

“ _Steve._ ”

“Yeah, Steve. But what am I to you, hmm? Who am I, Buck? I can see all over your face that you want to say it. Such a fucking shitty poker face—” Bucky exhales a halting laugh at the hypocrisy— “you can’t even hide it with your eyes covered. So why won’t you say it, huh? Just be nice to yourself.” He skims the thrumming carotid with his thumb. “And say it.”

“You’re my.” He wets his lips, then sticks his tongue out further, searching for Steve. But Steve doesn’t bite or grab his tongue. Just waits. Bucky tries, “You’re my bulldozer,” and it takes a moment, but Steve barks with laughter.  

So at least his voice is warm and amused when he says, “That’s a solid point, Buck, but you know what I’m asking you, right?”

Unclear on if it’s a real question, Bucky says, “Yeah,” because _yeah_. 

“Good. And I’m happy to keep bulldozing until you give me the right answer. If, uh. If you want.” He covers for that offered way out by making a series of screeching, rumbling sounds that are supposed to sound like heavy machinery but don’t.

Bucky smiles at that, and closes his eyes. It’s not hard to say, not when he’s falling asleep or watching TV or eating breakfast. Of course it’s easy to say then. When he doesn’t _have_ to say it. And even then, he knows that half the times he’s said it, he’s looked guilty and ready to take it back, caught with his hand in a cookie jar, asking too much—but Steve always says, “Sounds about right,” or, “Of course,” or smiles, flushes, and draws him closer.  
  
Bucky opens his eyes into more darkness. “You’re my owner.” And he mutters it, but that’s good enough, apparently.

“Yeah, I am, aren’t I? And what a cute little pet I’ve got.”

The hand on his throat isn’t choking, only keeping him in place. Making him unavoidably aware of the bob of his Adam’s apple when he swallows. But it’s a loose enough grasp that he can turn his head, trying to hide. His shoulders and hips try to squirm away too, without success. He whines, and his throat quivers against Steve’s palm.

Steve says, “Thanks for the demonstration. But you know what?” He fits his knee between Bucky’s legs, draws it up to nudge against his balls, and amidst Bucky’s whining, angles himself forward so that his own thigh presses along Bucky’s dick. Trusting him not to rut against it. “You could have said it with a little less attitude. Is it really that hard to not be petulant when I ask you a simple question?”

He punctuates this by biting Bucky’s cheek, rubbing his thigh and knee against him as he moves and Bucky flinches, initially, at the harsh tug of his flesh between Steve’s teeth. But he opens his mouth and lets it happen, lets that sharpness envelop him. A tear rolls down, and now Steve licks it up, and Bucky can feel him smiling.

He smiles back, his breathing uneven, and shrugs. “Guess I’m. Bad at it, yeah. I’m really sorry.” He swallows hard. “Try, try again, I guess.”

No more hand around his throat or smile against his face or leg pressed up close and getting him hotter. Steve says, “Break your fall,” and Bucky has just enough time to process that before he’s being dragged forward by his sweater. While he’s still startled and off-kilter, Steve shoves him over, and he falls without a fuss, but catches himself at the last second with his left hand, his face barely shy of slamming into the floor.

Steve gives his left forearm a quick little kick, signaling for him to lower himself all the way. Flat on the floor, he has some idea of what’s coming and turns his face to one side. Steve walks around him and says, “You _do_ try—” His sneaker comes down on Bucky’s head, across his parietal bone and stopping short of his eye—“and try again—so hard. It just never gets you anywhere, does it?”

“Gets me here.”

“That’s true. This where you want to be? Half-naked on the dirty floor with your _owner_ holding you in place?” He sounds like he’s trying not to laugh. It’s a good sound.

“With _you_ holding me in place, Steve.”

He exerts what’s probably the smallest amount of pressure he knows how to exert. Trapping him properly. “I believe that’s what I just said.”

Bucky grins. “Oh. It is, isn’t it?”

Steve sighs and steps off of him. “Redundant little bitch.”

“That’s me. You noticed?”

“A mosquito would notice. Come on. On your knees.”

He kneels up instead of resting on his heels. Makes a show of being eager to be played with like a good pet, but polite, with his hands flat against his thighs. He says, “You sound—” He stops to clear his throat. “Awfully confident that mosquitoes are unobservant. You ever talk to a mosquito?” Steve doesn’t answer, but does walk his fingers across the top of Bucky’s head. He goes on, “Can Sam talk to mosquitoes? You should text him and—”

He’s cut off by two of Steve’s fingers in his mouth, pressing down on his tongue. He thinks Steve is bent at the waist, not crouching, but it’s harder to tell here then it would be with on the creaking floorboards at home. Steve says, “You’re not making me wanna go easy on you.” He takes his fingers out.

Bucky wets his bottom lip and blinks hard before answering. “That’s okay.”

“No.” Steve’s voice is further away again, and he’s speaking very slowly. “I’ll decide if it’s okay. Do you understand?”

“Oh. Yeah, I do.” Warmth rushes to his face, and he grins, giddy. “Sorry. Really.”

It’s a struggle not to shift around on his knees or thrust his hips at all, and he does sway forward, unthinking. His thumb brushes against the underside of his dick and he flinches from the shock of how good he feels, for a second, in a down-to-the-raw-nerves kind of way. He shifts his hands further down his thighs.  

Steve says, “You just touch yourself?” and Bucky nods.

“Yeah. Sorry about that too.”

“That’s fine, but we don’t want it happening again, huh?” He gets down next to Bucky, facing him. Inches closer so his knees are solid and rough against Bucky’s thigh.

Bucky says, “Nah, wouldn’t want that,” and he thinks that Steve laughs, and then he’s holding a bottle of water to Bucky’s lips.

“You know I heard you clear your throat.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Bucky drinks from the bottle, long pulls from his throat. When he’s done, he hears Steve drink too, and set the bottle somewhere else.

Then he’s being steered down by the hair, and Steve’s other hand circles his wrist and pulls it forward, until Bucky gets the idea. He rests on his hands and knees, folding his right hand into a fully protective fist around the wad of gum.

 

   
  


A week ago, Steve was growling at his sketchpad as he tried to draw up a storyboard for the comic script Bucky had given him. His face was dusted with stubble, and tight-looking, and paler than usual. A subtle vibration all through his right leg. Bucky leaned against the left, arm hooked behind Steve’s calf and cheek leaning on his knee. He was listening to a podcast on the mp3 player he stole a few weeks into being a free man. It’s a brick; it’s held up well.

“Natasha said this show was all the rage now,” Steve had said, emailing him the download link.

“Radio shows were just because we didn’t have TV yet, Steve. What the hell kind of fake-ass nostalgia for a time you never lived through?”

“Excuse me. _I_ lived through it.” He makes the same joke any time Bucky uses “you” to refer to modern people.  

“Sure, you did, whippersnapper,” and Steve had grinned in response and mimed snapping a whip, and Bucky had moved his hands to his own belt and stared Steve down, biting his lip.

But now he was trying it, trying to ease into the story in the voices, to put himself back to sitting close to a Bakelite cathedral-style set with his eyes closed, hugging himself and wondering how _much_ The Shadow might know about him. How much of him might The Shadow see?

It wasn’t working. His left hand in his hair, just barely not ripping it out. That fake-ass nostalgia.

Steve pulled on his hair for him, a gentle tug like he was just ringing the doorbell. Bucky opened up to him, pulling the earbuds out and wrapping them around the machine, sliding it off to the side. He swiveled onto his knees, staring up at Steve. The haughty lift of his sure chin; the pointedly loose grip around his #2 pencil.

“What are you selling?” Bucky asked. He kissed Steve’s knee through his sweatpants.

Steve held eye contact with him and ripped the current page out of his sketchbook. He balled it up, and he threw it across the room. He said, “Oops. My hand slipped.” Bucky looked at him skeptically, and he clarified, “Go get that. Bring it back to me.”

Laughter sparked to life in Bucky’s chest, and it made no noise but he couldn’t not smile so huge. He said, “On it,” and stood up, hesitating once he was on his feet to see if Steve would shove him back down to his knees. He was allowed to stay standing, and he went and got the crumpled paper ball from where it had landed behind the TV. And he brought it back to Steve like a good dog playing fetch.

“Thank you,” Steve said, and turned the ball over in his hand, crumpling and crinkling it more. Bucky stood in front of him with his hands dangling at his sides, waiting for orders. Steve grinned at him and held the ball aloft. He threw it again, and raised his eyebrows. “Oops.”

What could Bucky do besides lean down and brush their cheeks together, and press a row of kisses from beneath Steve’s ear, down his jaw, to his lips? Besides rub his face against the curve of Steve’s neck, and straighten up, and fetch the paper again, this time crawling?

 

   
  
  


Something cold and wet touches his lips. Like lipstick, it slicks across the whole surface. Like lipstick applied without a mirror, it smears outside of his lip line. He keeps his mouth slack until Steve is done, and then he asks.

“Is that.” He gulps. “The highlighter?”

“Of course. Need to make sure all the important bits are marked off. We wouldn’t want to forget where they were.”

“You that forgetful?”

Steve pinches Bucky’s bottom lip, stretching it open and horizontal, leaving him exposed, like his teeth are being examined, like he’s a horse up for sale. “I don’t know, are you? ‘Cause it looks like you’re forgetting not to be a wiseass.”

Bucky widens his eyes, an ingrained response to Steve’s disapproval, then remembers the gauze. Though Steve must know that he’s doing it under there. He says, with his lip still stretched, “Sorry, Steve,” but it comes out, _Sar, Steh_ , and Steve says, “Are those words?”

Bucky nods. A dull throb starts up where Steve’s captured his lip.

“Well, that’s pathetic.” He gets his lip back. “But if that’s what you can do, then all right.” Steve kisses the side of his nose, and Bucky sighs, leaning into the barely-there touch. Steve adds, “You need to be careful not to lick your lips. Can you do that for me?”

“That seems likely.” Already, he has to the urge to lick, so he clenches his teeth. Locks his tongue up.

A huff of laughter. Steve moving around to the back of him. A hand petting down his spine, and Bucky stretches his neck forward, languorous with it. Then Steve says, “Here we go,” and spreads Bucky’s ass open with both hands.

His thumbs nudge at Bucky’s exposed hole, a detached touch that still makes him clench and swallow. One thumb draws a circle, like trying to ease him open, but he’s too dry and too aware of it, even as Steve nudges into him more.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Steve says. “You don’t gotta let me in just yet.” He moves his hands so that they can spread Bucky open further, his hole fluttering when exposed to the air, his heart fluttering with Steve’s calm certainty. His dick hard and distracting, brushing against his periodically tensing stomach, sending hot scatters of sparks through him.

With an over-the-top gross telegraphed hocking sound, Steve spits on his hole. “Aw. That wet enough do you think?”

“ _Steve._ I don’t know. Yes.” It’s not, but it feels like it in the moment, the spit still rolling down.

“I’m joking. We’re highlighting you, remember? Don’t stall.”

“Oh, my mistake.”

“That’s right. Thanks for owning up to it.” He stills, just keeping Bucky open, his grip unforgiving, and sucks air in through his teeth like he’s got something important to say. The wad of gum is drying and sticking to Bucky’s skin, getting between his fingers.

Steve says, “Hmm. Help me out here. Lean your weight down on your right arm.”

Bucky does, his forearm flat on the ground in front of him, angled inward, met by his dangling hair where his head is dropped down and turned to his left. He firms up his shoulder and upper arm. His left arm waits next to him, as limp as it can get.  
  
“Thanks, Buck. Now I’m gonna let go with this—” He squeezes Bucky’s left cheek—“hand, and you’re gonna reach back and keep yourself open for me, all right?”

He swears he purrs, a broken small growling, but catches himself and says, “Yeah. Doing that. You got it.” Lifts his left arm to take over for Steve, so they’re working in tandem to keep him open and waiting, to be marked up or used or spit on or laughed at. His own hand is more unrelenting than Steve’s, no pliability or warmth in it right now, and they’ll probably both leave fingerprint bruises from holding on so tight.  
  
The highlighter’s tip is soft against him, barely touching. Steve whistles, something from a car commercial, as he draws like that on the skin around Bucky’s asshole. Bucky shifts his shoulder against the hard floor.

His hole clenches and relaxes, and his dick twitches, all of his lower half warm and heavy and insistent. The tip of the highlighter jabs against his hole, and he hears himself make a small sound. Steve cuts off whistling, and takes the highlighter away. Stops holding him open.

He pats Bucky on the ass, patronizing in his gentleness. “You can put your hand down.” And Bucky switches back to all fours. “I think we’re done here, right?” He pats Bucky’s hip, closer to a smack this time. “Everything important highlighted now?”

Bucky tries not to rock against his hand. “What about my cock?”

One finger pushes up on the underside of his erection, tapping at it lightly. The muscles in his thighs tighten, and he closes his eyes beneath the gauze.

“This thing? What about it?”

“Please.” Steve’s finger stays there, stroking, and wetness spurts from Bucky’s dick. He whines. Steve takes the finger away. “Please highlight my dick. Please think it’s important. I’d—That would make me happy, Steve. Please.”

“Hmm. And what do you think would happen if I decided your dick was important?”

“You’d pay attention to it?”

“But do you think I’d make you get off?”

“Not necessarily. Not unless you wanted to. Steve, please. Mark me up there.”

Steve makes a disgusted noise. “What am I gonna do with my sweet little needy bitch?”

“Rules of the show say that’s up to you. I just provide the ingredients.”

“That’s right. And you did a good job of that, didn’t you?”

In lieu of an answer, Bucky makes a grumbling noise, and turns his head to hide his face against his shoulder. The more he thinks about the possibility of Steve highlighting his dick, the more he needs him to, or needs him to do anything, even that light stroking again, like his dick’s a newborn kitten Steve has to be careful with instead of something for treating roughly. Something like Bucky right now.

He spreads his legs further, trying to look like a more attractive thing for roughing up.

Steve says, “Well, look at that,” and smacks his inner thigh, then pinches him there. Bucky’s breath hitches with the sting, and he’d ask Steve to hit him again if he weren’t already in the process of begging him for something else.

But he can say, “Thank you,” and Steve says, “Any time,” and lays his hand flat on the small of Bucky’s back.

“And fine, by the way. Stay where you are.”

His other hand snakes beneath the bridge of Bucky’s body. Exploratory, at first, the warm heel of his palm slides across Bucky’s stomach where the sweater and shirt hang away from him, and Bucky consciously shallows his breathing in response. Then Steve’s knuckles come up against the head of his cock, and begin to move in small circles, nudging at the tip where he’s dripping, and Bucky shudders and gasps.

Steve says, “It’s okay,” and pets him with the hand on his back. Then brings his hand down Bucky’s stomach to the base of his shaft and shifts how he’s holding his hand. With the first cold press of the highlighter to his dick, Bucky lets out a half-strangled yelp. Steve ignores him, and lightly draws a line up the underside.

Bucky’s abdominal muscles jump and he thinks his back tries to arch up against the flat of Steve’s hand, and his whole awareness is cool, wet ink, and how hot Steve’s hand is trailing along with it. He keens, “ _Steve_ ,” and Steve lets the highlighter linger at Bucky’s crown.

“You need something, Buck?” He taps the tip against Bucky thoughtfully. Punctuation, but just a comma, since he’s still holding the fucking thing there.

Bucky says, “Nothing. Just. You. Know. Saying your name.”

Steve laughs a little, and says, “Okay, weirdo,” and finishes the job in a quick swoop, continuing the line up around the head and down the rest of Bucky’s dick until it meets back up with his stomach in half the time he took with the underside. He pulls his hand out and switches to digging both elbows into Bucky’s back. He says, “Happy now?”

Bucky can picture him resting his chin in his hands, like this is a casual Sunday Night Hang Out and Brood. He says, “You know it. As a clam.” He turns his face toward Steve over his shoulder, and smiles up at him. A regular smile, but he finds himself starting to laugh, and bites his highlighted lip, thinking about Steve watching him.

Steve says, “Why don’t I take my clam on vacation, then?”

“Yeah? Do you usually take a clam on vacation?”

“No. The clams are supposed to already be at the beach. Guess you got lost.” The weight on Bucky’s back lifts, and Steve’s in front of him, framing his face with his hands. He coos, “You poor little thing. I can fix that for you. Would you like that?”

“Yeah, Steve.” He turns to kiss Steve’s left hand, on top of a callous. “Put me back where I belong, please.”

It’s hard to say whether Steve’s just kidding around or if he really set up something like a beach in Gerry’s fucking Gym. If he was just waiting for a conversational opening to segue into forcing Bucky into a flooding room or burying him in sand. Either way, they’re going _somewhere_ , because Steve stands and starts to walk away, but stops. He says, “You can hear my footsteps? Tell where I’m going?”

“I’m a very good tracking animal.”

“Good boy. Follow me then.”

On a good, normal day, Bucky lists to his left side. On a great normal day like today, the pull to slope left is even stronger, as he crawls with the palm of his left hand but with the knuckles of his right, keeping his chewed gum far away from the floor. And with his weight less evenly distributed, the floor bites harder at his knees. He’s slow, and he lurches, and he imagines himself made out of tea cups. Wobbly, boiling, about to shatter.

 

   
  
  


Last night, Steve came home to find Bucky sprawled on the kitchen counter. One knee raised, his boot planted flat, the other leg dangling. He was staring up at the underside of the cabinets, eating an apple, _acknowledging ownership of body_ —now a sometimes-hobby instead of a scheduled part of his daily routine—by putting his body in a stupid place for no reason.

Steve came in with soft steps, without switching the light on. Something clanked where he put it down on the floor. He said, “Y’know, if I were a normal person, I would’ve shrieked in fright just now.”

Bucky angled himself so his head came partway off the counter and he could stare at Steve upside-down instead of at the cabinets. “Then I suppose it’s lucky for both of us you ain’t exactly a normal person. But excuse me—” he took a tart bite of apple and spoke as he chewed—“if anyone has a right to be _shocked_ right now, it’s me. What are you doing sneaking up on an old man like that?”

The upside-down Steve got closer and more looming. He wrapped a hand around Bucky’s raised knee and bent forward to talk face-to-face. “I don’t know. What’s an old man doing stepping on our kitchen counter? For someone who claims _I_ track too much dirt around the house—”

“Yeah, well, one: I’m the one spending a good deal of my time hangin’ out on the floor.” He lifted his left hand and placed it against Steve’s stomach. Steve’s body was warm even though he came in from outside in only a tee shirt.

“You do,” Steve said, sounding indulgent.  
  
“Two: These are my indoor boots. They’re clean as houses. And three, I’m gonna wipe down the counter when I’m done. Because they’re clean as _our_ house. Which _isn’t_.” He grinned. “Because you track so much goddamn dirt around.” A seed got mixed in with his next bite.

Steve’s jaw jerked. A suppressed smile. He dipped further to kiss Bucky, even as Bucky kept chewing. He smelled like sweat and dirt and deodorant, and Bucky did stop chewing after all, and parted his lips. In went Steve’s tongue, slicking along the backs of Bucky’s top teeth. And out it came, and took some apple mush with it.

“That’s really gross, Steve.”

Steve shrugged. “Tastes good. Are there more apples?”

“Crisper drawer.”  
  
“Thanks.”

“Speaking of that,” he said, as Steve fetched three more apples from the drawer, “you know what would be nice?” He caught a tossed apple in his left hand.

“Uh, apple butter. Candy apples. Is ‘apple’ code for something?” He came back and tapped the pocket of Bucky’s jeans, right where the Swiss army knife was tucked.

Bucky said, “Help yourself,” and Steve did, hand a sweet pressure against Bucky’s thigh as he tugged it out to skin his apple. Aiming, as usual, for one long strip of peel. “There’s no code. I was just thinking about you William Telling me.” He’d been thinking about it when he bought the apples from a street vendor in the first place, and had been thinking about it off-and-on ever since.

“What, as in—”

To demonstrate, Bucky moved his left hand so he was clamping the uneaten apple against the top of his head. “Yeah, and then you’d shoot it off.” 

As usual, Steve lost patience with the skinning. As usual, he held the strip of peel he did manage to cut above Bucky’s mouth, and Bucky stretched up to take it from him, kissing the joint of his thumb before they separated.

Steve folded up the knife and laid it on Bucky’s chest. Stroked the back of his hand down Bucky’s cheek. “Any other details?” He started to eat his apple at the still-peeled part, like he was hiding the evidence of his failure.

“I’d be blindfolded, probably. And naked. If it were a gun, we’d have to find somewhere else to do it, but bow and arrows would work in here sufficiently.”

“Oh. A _gun_ is on the table. Of course. Are you meaning to say you trust my aim that much?”

Bucky kicked him gently in the knee.  “Hey, it’s not like an arrow wouldn’t do damage if you missed. Or I don’t know what all this ‘Hawkeye’ nonsense would be about.”

“I’ll make sure to tell Clint you said that.”

“Oh, sure, all of it, right? ‘My boyfriend the Winter Soldier thinks it would be _really_ hot and romantic if I—”

Steve laughed a little. “Oh, shut up. Seriously, you would trust me to _shoot_ an apple off your _head_? While you were blindfolded.”

Bucky left the uneaten apple on the counter so that he could extend his left hand to Steve. Holding onto his own extra apple, Steve gave him that hand. Bucky grasped the fingers he did have free, and felt Steve curl them in response. He said, “Yeah. I do.”

Steve ducked his head. This did very little to hide his face from Bucky, who was still looking up at him from below. Cleanly framed for him: Steve’s every individual eyelash, the thin skin of his eyelids, his nose like a shark fin, his mouth hooked into a smile on one side. His eyes opened, and he raised an eyebrow at Bucky. Bucky raised both eyebrows back.

The crisp _h_ sound of Steve breathing out through his nose, and he said, “All right, well. _I_ don’t trust myself with that. I like it as a thought. But I’m not doing that.” He worked on eating the skinless portion of his apple. The apple blocked a lot of his face. Hiding how apologetic he probably looked, somehow still embarrassed about having limits, no matter how hard Bucky worked to normalize it.

Bucky shrugged and smiled at him. Most of the time he had a good handle on what Steve would and wouldn’t want to do, but sometimes Steve surprised him, and sometimes Bucky’s calibration was screwy and he said things like, _What if you threw me out a third story window and then tended to my wounds?_ And Steve, the sweetheart, had pretended to consider that like it wasn’t crazy.

“Roger that,” Bucky said. “But you’re welcome for the mental image.”

“That was generous. I won’t lie.” The slow way he blinked as he said it, it was obvious he meant it. Bucky found himself grinning, a sudden firework of an expression, powerful enough to make his body jump. And Steve puckered his mouth before smiling, softer and smaller.

Bucky said, “You know how selfless I can get.”

Steve leaned his head against the cabinet. “Hmm. You still going to the library tomorrow?” And Bucky drew his dangling leg up the back of Steve’s calf and thigh.

 

   
  
  


A door creaks open. Steve leads him inside, and the floor beneath his hands and knees is padded. The mats are surprisingly thick for a place this decrepit. Startling after the bite of the hardwood in the hallway. But they’re firm enough that he could maybe even fall asleep in here. Maybe he and Steve could both fall asleep in here. Almost like sharing a real bed.  

Steve stops walking. Stands quietly. Then circles back and shuts the door behind them. Bucky shuffles around to keep facing him, the order to follow not rescinded yet. Steve makes a low noise that sounds maybe approving.

He says, “All right, you can sit down. However’s comfortable. I need a moment.”

“Aye aye.”

Bucky raises from his hands, grimacing at a new crick in his lumbar spine. He pretzels his legs. Tries not to focus too much on the sounds of Steve sitting by the door and yanking off his sneakers. Focus: a steady, tugging pulse in his groin; the arch he puts in his back to soothe the ache; the gum gluing his hand into a fist and still smelling faintly of mint; each scattered maybe-bruise Steve’s given him so far; breathe in one two three; breathe out one two three; his naked ass on the mats; a need.  

It’s not until Steve’s already standing over him that Bucky notices he’s finished with his shoes. “Come on,” Steve says, and wraps his hand around Bucky’s right bicep and yanks up.

Bucky scrambles to follow, letting himself fall against Steve’s body at first. His dick rubbing up against Steve’s shirt, drawing a shattered groan from his chest. There’s a strange series of lumps there. Steve’s wearing what feels like a fanny pack? Then Steve pushes his arm out, holding Bucky some distance away.

Something smooth taps Bucky’s lips. It intrudes further into his mouth, but stops at the barrier of his teeth. With his lips wrapped around it, Bucky can feel the shape properly, and knows that it’s one of the ping-pong balls.

“What am I going to do with this? Don’t answer that.” He squeezes the hinge of Bucky’s jaw, a fresh, singing soreness that makes him flex his muscles in a slinking wave up his legs to his pelvic floor, and in his right shoulder. Steve’s fingers and the ping pong ball slide around in Bucky’s mouth. Rolling into his cheeks, down the road of his tongue, and he holds himself still, silent. His mouth opens wider each time that he gags and forces the gagging back down.

When Steve pulls out, Bucky’s mouth feels slick and loose and used. Unthinking, he works his lips to encourage his own excess spit to drip down his chin. Steve says, “Adorable,” and, “Thanks for getting this wet for me.”

Bucky swallows and blinks hard. “You’re welcome, Steve.” Hoarse-voiced. Not thirsty, but needy.

Steve lets go of his arm and walks behind him. He puts a hand on his ass, spanning half, sinking his nails in. Moving the fat and muscle in a circle. The hand moves to dig in lower and repeat. It’s harsh, and targeted, and Bucky’s stomach is like a trapped moth. Steve stops gripping. One pinch to the crease between Bucky’s ass and upper thigh makes his head jerk forward and an, “Oh,” escape his lips.

Then Steve punches him, centered in the meat of his ass. Bucky says, “Fuck, Christ,” It’s a pulled punch, sure, and the four that follow are too, but the soreness goes straight to the muscle. And thinking about it, about being Steve’s punching bag, makes his head swim. “Thanks,” he says when Steve’s probably done.

“Well, I _am_ just giving you what you deserve. Anyway—” The ping pong ball reappears, nudging at Bucky’s crack. “Remember this little guy?” Steve preemptively steadies him with a hand on his left shoulder.

“Remember? What’s remembering?”

“That’s hilarious. I really do wonder what I’m doing with this. You did get it wet, after all. It’d be a shame to waste that.”

The ball parts his ass, and it is spit-wet, but there’s no way it’ll fit inside him right now, not like this, but it’s trying, and—

“ _Steve_. Wait—”

The ping pong ball disappears immediately. Steve kisses the back of his neck. “All right, well I don’t have to.”

Bucky inhales, trying to imitate the ocean. If Steve tries with him standing like this, without opening him up first, it probably won’t even work. Steve knows that. He’ll open him up in a second. He’ll keep his fingers secure around the ball. He’s just fucking around. “No, Steve. You can. You can do it. I take it back.”

“That’s brave of you, but I wasn’t actually _planning_ to. Just dreaming out loud.”  A friendly bite to Bucky’s left shoulder. “I’ve got something different in mind for you. Stay where you are. And I mean exactly.”

Stocking-foot, ghost-silent, Steve goes somewhere else. The silence stretches, making Bucky jittery, and then a ping-pong ball smacks him in the back of the head. He shrieks, then settles. He _doesn’t_ startle that easily. He doesn’t.

This time, he can tell where Steve is by the sound of him dipping into the fanny pack for another ball. He thinks about that too hard, instead of about staying _exactly_ where he is, and flinches out of the ball’s path before it can hit him.

Steve groans. “What did I tell you?”

“Right. I’m sorry.”

When it happens a second time, Steve doesn’t comment. The third time, Steve says, “Stop anticipating, Bucky. It’s not your problem where I am. It’s not your problem that something’s being thrown at you. That’s mine to worry about. What do you worry about?”

“Earthquakes, honestly. Train delays.”

Steve sounds unamused. “Not the answer I was going for.”

“Uh. Standing still for you, Steve. For you to hit me. With the ping pong balls.”

“So _do_ that. I’m not gonna tell you again.”

Another one pegs him in the ass so that he jumps, but he puts himself back where he was. He knows there are six left. He swivels the smallest bit and dodges the next one. He says, “Shit, Steve, seriously, I’m _trying_. I can hear you too well.”

Steve huffs. Something unbuckles, drops. A light, plasticky bounce and crinkling. Steve appears, perpendicular, at Bucky’s side, pressing close enough to confirm that he’s removed the fanny pack.  He angles himself so that he has a hand on each side of Bucky’s waist, then extends his far leg so that it crosses behind both of Bucky’s at an angle. And he tips him back, enough to make the intimation clear. That he’ll trip Bucky if he needs to.

He says “Can you really not follow a simple instruction?”

“I. I can do better.” It’s possible that he can’t, that something inside him doesn’t want to turn off and cooperate. But Steve’s hands are sure and real at his waist, and tilted back he feels quieter, woozier. Ready to be tripped and to spread, buttery, all over the floor. 

Steve sets him straight again. Takes his hands away, and there’s the soft sound of him spitting but trying to be dainty about it. Nothing happens to enlighten Bucky about where the spit is going. Steve just says, “Can you? Then why didn’t you do better this time?” The spitting sound again.

“I don’t know. But now I know what I did wrong?”

Steve’s hand smooths over his hair, from hairline to the base of his skull, repetitive and soothing. Softly, he says, “What you did wrong—” His hand travels down to Bucky’s back and pushes so that he bends forward— “is be incompetent, Buck.”

One finger, slicked with spit, begins spearing into his hole, and he flinches and clenches at the intrusion. “And you’re still moving.” Steve sighs. He forces his finger in further. It’s wet enough, really, but he gave Bucky no time to open up, and he can’t control his whimpering, can’t think about anything else but Steve’s finger thrusting roughly. “Look, you want to move that badly, I can make you move.”

Bucky says, “You’re already making me move.”

When Steve says, “I guess I am, aren’t I?” Bucky knows the exact fake-modest look he must have on his face. The same way he looked when they played Clue and he won with _Professor Plum, dining room, wrench._ “But that’s no excuse to talk back.”

He takes the hand bending Bucky over and reaches around to fuck three fingers in and out of Bucky’s mouth. Bucky closes his eyes, keeps his head in place, but writhes his tongue along Steve’s skin. Folds his lips over his teeth.

“So I have a question for you, Buck. Something I need to clarify.” He stops fucking his mouth, instead fitting his thumb along the upward curve of Bucky’s jaw, fingertips spread on either side of his chin, the heel of his hand against his pulse.

“How’d I get so—” _Stupid, ugly, pathetic, pliable, needy_ —He isn’t actually sure what he’s about to say, and his words come out slow and gasping, plenty of time for Steve to shush him anyway.

“Let me _ask_. Is it cheating to use lube? You didn’t include it in the basket.”

And he means it as a genuine question, but with his other fingers skimming across Bucky’s ass like he’s got something else he wants to be doing with them, it feels like a threat. Bucky shudders and makes a sound that’s part hiss and part moan. “Uh. No, Steve. I don’t. Think it’s cheating. I think it’s the equivalent of, uh, a kitchen utensil.”

“Is that right? So could I have brought kitchen utensils too?”

Bucky thinks about Steve smacking him with their spatula, gagging him with the end of a rolling pin like a wooden dick, shoving the sharp edges of cookie cutters into his flesh—Steve, who definitely asked only to make him think about this, scratches Bucky’s ass sharp and sudden with his thumbnail, close to the center, since that’s what he can reach, and Bucky jolts.

He recovers with a shaky laugh. “The _equivalent._ Geeze, we need to work on your grasp on analogies, huh?”

“Gee, _golly_ ,” Steve says, pitching his voice high. “Think you could tutor me?”

“Oh, no. I’ve fallen for that one before. I need you telling me I’m lying about how exponents work like I need a hole in the head.”

“You’ve already got a hole in your head. What do you think I was just fucking?”

 “Well, I don’t need another one, then.”

“That’s a good point. After all, there’s another sloppy hole down here,” and he takes his finger out of Bucky’s ass, removes something from his pocket, unscrews a cap. “Down, boy,” he mutters, and Bucky drops, lies face-down on the floor. He licks experimentally. A normal, unappealing rubber taste.

When Steve puts a knee in the small of his back and brings his fingers back to Bucky’s hole, they’re wet with lube, warm from the little bottle being held close to Steve’s body for who knows how long. Bucky might not be able to stay in place to get hit from afar, but he _can_ hold his hips still and not hump the flooring. He knows this much.

Steve still doesn’t give him much preparation, getting one finger in him, then two. His fingers are long and thick, and Bucky’s hole closed up pretty fast when Steve pulled out of him the first time. Nothing exists, at the moment, except the fact of the intrusion. Now Steve scissors his fingers apart, pushes them deeper, and his index finger finds Bucky’s prostate, rubbing at it, and Bucky moans, pushing his hips up toward Steve to take pressure off his dick.

But Steve pushes him back down. “Shhh.” He brushes against him there again, gentle, wracking Bucky’s body, held firmly under his knee, with electric, buoyant need. Then he fits a third finger inside and pulls back to give only short thrusts. Not accomplishing anything but making Bucky feel open and full and pieced apart. He snaps his teeth at the mat, wishing for something solid to bite down on to muffle his moans.

As he fucks him, Steve says, “So here’s something _incredibly_ fun. For our next death-defying act, we’re going to play a game inside a game.”

“I love it,” Bucky says through a groan. “Please tell me more.” He grinds his teeth together. His body’s a bundle of live wires.

“Look at you, using your manners.”

“Finishing school. Really paid off.”

He needs friction, to move, for something to shift, and finally, Steve pulls out of him, and even having been drowning in it, he whines at the emptiness. “There we go,” Steve says. “Like I said. Sloppy.” And he flicks the sensitive rim of his hole, so that he yelps and tries to tighten up and his hips jump again.

“So,” Steve says. “Here’s how this game works.” Bucky flattens his face more thoroughly against the mats, realizing that he’s crying a little. That he must look red and terrible. Steve pauses. Bucky stays there. Steve says, “Bucky. Turn your head to the side.”

He does, and takes a deep breath. He’s here _for_ Steve to see him looking teary and red and terrible. He says, “Sorry. A glitch.”

“Good robot. As I was saying. You’re going to get on your hands and knees again. And since you’re _so incapable_ of not listening for a sound’s source, you’re going to go where my voice is. If I say your name, you follow the sound of my voice.”

“And then what?”

“Nothing. You do that until I make you stop.” Bucky frowns at him. “Don’t try to tell me that sounds too easy. Nothing’s easy for a thing like you except getting fucked.”

“And sometimes I can’t even do that right.”

“Isn’t it weird? That’s a real unsolved mystery. Up. Come on.”

Bucky shudders up onto his hands and knees. He sniffles. Still, for now, oversensitive inside.  “I’ve got a thought.”

“Unlikely.”

It seems unfair to roll his eyes behind the gauze, but it’s not like Steve doesn’t know full-well he’s doing it. “We should open a detective agency.  We could wear hats and share a desk. Pass a bottle back and forth. Complain in ominous tones.”

“Yeah? Right now we should do that? ‘Cause we’re kind of in the middle of something, Buck.”

“Please, Steve. Like I would ever ask you to multitask. Just asking you to hang onto that thought for me in case it falls out my ear.”

Steve snorts. “I think I can manage that. Are you gonna shut the fuck up now, or am I gonna have to make you?”

Bucky lifts his left hand—a precarious operation, with the right still a sticky fist—and mimes zipping and locking his lips, and tossing the key to the last place he heard Steve’s voice coming from. And he’s annoyed to realize that he can’t ask to make sure Steve mimed catching it. Probably, probably he did, because why would he leave a key to Bucky’s mouth just lying around?

Steve says, “Bucky.” Simple and quiet. Straight ahead.  

And Bucky crawls toward him, alert for the catch. When Steve’s voice comes from somewhere else before he’s gotten there, Bucky turns himself sixty degrees and follows. And again: _Bucky, Bucky, Bucky_. “Here, Bucky,” said one time with a laugh, directly behind him so he has to about-face. He’s getting lost in all the turning, could trace it all back but doesn’t want to. What he wants is Steve like this, on every side of him, demanding his attention from every corner of the room.

 He’s more out of breath than he should be, and really, he’s not _out_ , but coming up to the edge of it. His knees sore, knuckles bruisey, balls heavy, lips parted for some minor addition to the performance of _dog_ comma _panting like a._

Steve says, “Bucky,” and Bucky changes course incrementally off to the left. Then the top of his skull bumps into Steve’s kneecap.

For a few moments, neither of them does anything about it. So Bucky takes it upon himself. Lifts his head and kisses Steve’s knee. Lowers to rub his face against Steve’s calf. Letting the left arm take more weight. His ass shifts in the air. The thrill of that exposure makes him nuzzle Steve more.

Then Steve’s hand tucks into his hair, ushering him upward. “Bucky,” he says, his voice bent close. Bucky lifts his face toward Steve, kneels up, and Steve kisses him. Slow. Chapped-lipped. Nipping at him. Bucky whines into it, grateful, held aloft by only that. Steve stops kissing him, sits, and says, “Hey, dipshit,” and Bucky crawls closer, clambering into his lap.

In a few sharp moves, Steve’s maneuvered them so that they’re both lying down, face-up, Bucky spread out on top of Steve like a blanket, kept there by an arm over his chest. His head lies just below Steve’s mouth.

Steve says, “Huh, look at that. I won.”

“Oh, huh. Is that what happened?”

“It looks that way from my position.”

“I wouldn’t know.” He lets himself go dead-weight. Steve grunts, and vibrates his arm against Bucky’s stomach to shake him.

“From my position, I’ve got you captured. And that means I win.” He knocks his chin against Bucky’s skull. Pulls on his earlobe, sharp heat. “Ha ha.”

 

   
  
  


One luxury of the cold at night in the forest was that he and Steve could sleep holding onto each other in their foxhole and no one had any questions. Jim was at watch, and Bucky could hear him shuffling his deck of cards. No one ever saw him playing solitaire; he just talked about it.

Bucky was huddled up at Steve’s back. Plastered to the furnace of his new body. Dirt clung to their faces and lived under Bucky’s nails. He tried to clean it out with a knife, when he had the time, but it always came back. A smear of dried blood remained on Steve’s neck from the day before.

They were both awake. Breathing shallowly even as they tried to relax. The latest method for relaxing was telling each other about books they’d read recently. Trying to call up excerpts they liked, a kind of game. But they ran out somewhere. The last book Bucky read was the pulp he had secreted in his jacket when he was captured.

It still spooked him to be able to talk under his breath and trust that Steve would hear him. But it was handy for some things.

He whispered, “What if you weren’t Captain America?” and he felt Steve go stiff in his arms.

But Steve tried to play it off, teasing, “I thought you _liked_ the outfit.”

Bucky rested his hand on Steve’s padded hip. “I do. That’s not what I mean, man. I’m telling you a jerk-off fantasy.”

“Oh. Who am I?”

“Let’s say you’re Bat-Man.”

“I’m what?”

“I’m glaring at the back of your head. It’s the guy in the bat costume. In the comics. I showed you.”

The silence stretched. Shuffling cards. Somewhere, an owl. “I didn’t know that’s why you were showing me.”

“I wasn’t. I just liked the story. Are you okay? I can stop talking.”

And then Steve rolled so that he was supine, watching Bucky, his head tilted back. It gave Bucky something akin to vertigo, this look at how squared off his jaw had become. A muscle in that square jaw jumped. Like it pained him, Steve said, “I’m okay. I missed you.” He lowered his eyes. “You better keep talking.”

It was the closest Steve had come to admitting, _I thought you were dead_ , since he blurted it out upon finding him. At no point had Bucky said, _If we’re being honest, I thought_ you _were dead. I thought we were all dead, me included._

Bucky raised his eyebrows. Tension bled from his shoulders, and his neck lolled. He stared at the curve of Steve’s ear wonderingly. “Well, all right. So let’s say you’re Bat-Man.” He had to gather himself back up, and as he did, Steve got on his side so they faced each other. Inched close and tangled up their legs. His face was softening in slow-motion.

“And what are you? The, uh. Child?”

“Okay, you don’t have to act like you actually remember the comic. I’m not the child. I’m—I guess I’m me. But a different me.”

“Smarter? Better-looking?”

Bucky smiled and let his eyelids flutter. “No. It’s just—me without a Steve. Or—No, I used to also be a detective. But now a supervillain’s got me in his mansion. He’s got me hypnotized. I’m his to use. And I don’t know a different way. But you show up.”

“Me, Bat-Man.”

“You, Bat-Man. You rescue me. You work really hard on breaking the hypnosis. You use a lot of really weird techniques. Tying me up. Dunking me in water.”

“Why are those my techniques?”

“’Cause you’re real cutting-edge. Anyway, it works. But I. Fall in love with you. And now I want _you_ to use me. To make me your partner and dunk me in water more and fuck me until I scream.”

Steve put two fingers inside Bucky’s mouth. He was wearing his gloves, jumpy, ready, even though they figured they were safe right now. Bucky closed his lips around him.  Kept him there. Safe. When Steve wormed a hand beneath Bucky’s layers of clothes and pinched his nipple, his whine was muffled to a small swallow of sound. He widened his eyes, and looked at Steve looking at him. How the skin around his eyes crinkled up.

“Did you already jerk off to this?” Steve asked.

Bucky nodded. Steve took his fingers out. “Behind a tree. When we were—Uh, on the way back. From. Soon after. Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“Kind of a lot was happening. I’ll find it in my heart to forgive you.”

Slow and careful, Bucky laced his fingers through Steve’s. He said, “Do you have to? Immediately?” and tried to smile the way he would have before, saying that. He did mean the smile. It was just that sometimes, these days, he couldn’t be that person. Not exactly the same. Not exactly the same at all.  

 

   
  
  


Bucky says, “You’re having _entirely_ too much fun.”

Steve pauses in chewing on Bucky’s hair. “What can I say? You’re hours of fun, Buck. The best toy I ever got for Christmas.”

“Oh yeah? How many fucking toys have you ever gotten for Christmas? A gyroscope and some model planes?”

“And a teddy bear with a hot water bottle inside. You saying you’re not honored to be more fun? Easier to heat up too.”

Bucky laughs through the words, “Don’t be weird.”

“Excuse me? I’ll be as weird as I want to be.”

“Yeah.” Bucky grins, twists his neck to make sure Steve can see him properly. “What say have I got in it?”

“Zero. And I’d hate to have to heat you up much more right now.” He palms Bucky’s ass, pinches him once, then leaves him be there. He says, “So I’ve been rethinking the William Tell thing.”

“What? You’re not gonna do it.”   

“Hear me out.”

“Hearing you out, but picture me dubious.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’m always picturing you dubious. It makes you look like a cartoon. My dumb fucking bug-eyed toy. Promise to stop me if you need to.” His hand loosely circles Bucky’s dick.

“No shit, Steve.” That gets him a bite on the bony tip of his ear.

“Let’s say you were kidnapped by some aristocratic fuck. We never knew each other. You were just a mild-mannered young man in an office building.” For a moment, Bucky isn’t drawn in, instead noting how careful Steve’s being to distance the story from any real trauma. For both of their benefits, probably. A long pause. Then, “He keeps you around just so he can shoot things off your head. Apples. Bottles. You’ve got scars on your face from the glass shattering and cutting you up.”

His hand tightens, and Bucky’s throat bobs as he resists the urge to thrust. He whimpers, and Steve kisses him behind the ear. Bucky says, “Where are my scars?” Closing his eyes, even in the dark, to picture them better.

Steve’s free hand traces paths on Bucky’s face. Snaking up his jaw toward his nose. Through an eyebrow. Down the middle of his lips. “And here too,” he adds, squeezing Bucky’s dick so he yelps. “He’s a real pervert, you know. He’s got you trained up so it makes you hard.”

“Sure, ‘cause I’d need training for that.”

“Of course. You were just a pure and virginal young man when he took you. Not a masochistic thought in your empty little head. I’m going to start moving. Don’t you dare try to fuck my fist on your own.”

He strokes him in a tight hold from just below the head of his dick to the root, then up again, over the head, twisting, continuing this slow movement as he goes on with the story. “One day, a vigilante shows up. He says he’s there to bust this asshole for his assorted crimes. That’s me by the way.”

Bucky screws up his face, his breath getting harder, and keeps his hips still even as his shoulders push back against Steve’s chest, his head lolling. “I can’t. Contain. My surprise.” The last word gets swallowed in a moan as Steve’s thumb brushes over his slit, spreading the pre-ejaculate there, lighting him up.

“I rescue you from this guy. I bundle you up in my arms and take you back to my base. Get you clothed.”

“Whatever for?” His voice is getting rougher and breathier, and he has to keep talking, letting Steve hear him unspool that way.

“Well, I don’t know how useful you are yet. I’ve got no idea what to do with this poor broken little thing except take care of you. I put you in my clothes. Feed you up. Tend to your more recent wounds. By the way, tell me if you’re going to come. It happens without permission, you won’t like the consequences.”

Bucky nods, his hair and cheek brushing Steve’s face. “Are you gonna—” He shudders. “Touch my nipples at all?”

“Did you ask me to highlight your tits?” 

“No.”

“Then no. You begged for your dick, and that’s what you get. But don’t worry. I’ll be nice to you. Here.” He drops Bucky’s dick and reaches lower. As he talks, he drags all of his nails up the front of Bucky’s thigh, scoring him deep from knee to hip, and Bucky stutters a high scream, tearing up when Steve switches to his inner thigh, grabbing the meat and twisting. Then pinching, smaller and smaller bits, closer to his balls.

And Steve is saying, “I’m joking with you as I clean you up, trying to be gentle, and you’re quiet. Staring at me. Like I’m a puzzle. When I’m done cleaning you up, you ask where I usually do target practice. I give you a real answer. I don’t understand what you’re asking yet. When I found you, naked and blindfolded, I thought you were about to be executed.”

He pushes Bucky’s scratched-up thigh open, claws at him harder on the inside, and it feels like some blood is beading up. Bucky turns his face against Steve’s, whimpering in his ear, and Steve smacks him where he’s scratched, again, again, so close to his balls, but he isn’t highlighted there either—Steve had _pointedly_ not highlighted him there when he marked his dick.

Steve’s continuing, “You start telling me I should feel free to use you. You suggest I use darts, guns, arrows—” The hand not death-gripping Bucky’s thigh—making the other thigh feel unfairly whole and painless—slides between their bodies, rummaging through Steve’s pocket—“throwing knives.

“Obviously, I’m horrified. I rebuff you, tell you you’re a person, but you don’t understand. You think I want you to beg, and you do, so prettily. You say what a good stand you can be. Such a good target. Really talk yourself up. You offer to let me throw some darts in you. It won’t cause permanent harm if I’m careful.”

It becomes clear in a moment what Steve took out of his pocket—Bucky had forgotten anything from the basket still remained—when his welted, smarting thigh is scratched again, this time more precisely, by an unbent paperclip edge. He holds his breath. His head jerks back. He says, “ _Oh,_ ” as the rest of the paperclip chain, all hooked together, trails along him where he’s sensitive.

Steve mocks him in his ear, “ _Oh. Ohhh_ ,” fond and beautiful. “I start getting real conflicted, of course. You’re so pathetic, begging on your knees for me, bandaged up, trying not to cry—He punished you whenever you cried. I start wondering what it would look like if you did. How ugly and stupid you would look. How small and broken.”

Beneath him, Bucky can feel Steve’s heartbeat, strong and fast with arousal. An unconscious tightening of the hand that holds his legs open. It’s overwhelming, how much he can get to Steve by giving him this, and he spreads his painless leg out further too, an offering.

“Please.”

“Yes? Please what? Beg properly, Buck. You know better.”

“Please.” He laughs a little, hysterical, thick-voiced. “Hurt me more. I need it.”

“Really. Not, ‘please jerk you off more?’”

“No, I mean. Either. Both. Um. If I have to choose, uh.”

“Well, good thing you don’t get a choice, huh? Wouldn’t want you to strain anything trying to think about it.”

Using Bucky’s leg as a table so that he’ll feel the motion, Steve loops the paperclip chain in half, then half again, and transfers it to his right hand. He begins to whip the inside of Bucky’s unblemished thigh. Each hit scatters sharp stings across his skin, both light and bright enough that he’s smiling with each gasp. And they build on each other quickly, until he’s giggling and whining in alternating fits, and it feels like his chest is cleaving in two, ribs uncurling with pleasure, when finally Steve picks the paperclip chain up and whips it down onto Bucky’s dick instead. 

“ _Jesusfucking_ ,” Bucky whispers, awed, as his dick momentarily burns and bobs in response. “Steve.  Please.” Steve hums in reply, and bows Bucky’s head further to one side. Clamps his teeth down on the side of Bucky’s neck and sucks.

When he comes up for air: “I keep you at my base. You beg me less pretty soon, but it’s obvious you still need to be used. Eyeing me up whenever I ash my cigarettes in an ash tray. Whenever I put my feet up on an ottoman instead of on you. You’re a desperate. Needy. Thing.”

He whips Bucky with the paper clips, his thigh again, after each word. “I even take you out to where I shoot so you’ll see that I don’t use people as targets, but you don’t exactly consider yourself a person. You’re a great shot, but you’re still unsatisfied. Aching all over for it. Wanting to be a good object for me. I hate to see you suffering.” He presses his grin into the hickey so Bucky will feel.

“Oh, sure,” Bucky says, and laughs, sobs, whatever. His eyes are wet and prickling, and as he blinks, tears start to escape. Slick falls wet from the head of his dick, onto where his sweater and undershirt have ridden up his stomach with his fidgeting. Even the movement of the cotton against his nipples is making him flushed with how hard they are, how desperate all of him is now. 

Steve pulls on a bit of his hair, not enough to hurt. Just affirming his presence. “Jesus, you’re squirmy today. They’re paper clips, not a belt buckle.” He gives a long sigh. “Change of plans, I think.”

“Sorry.”  
  
“For what? I did say I would make you move. Now stand and let me up.”  

It’s like pulling himself out of a deep sleep, but he does it. Pushing up on his hands, with Steve’s hand careful at the small of his back. Crouching, unfolding. Standing over Steve and shivering with the loss of close body heat.

He hears Steve shift back, pulling his legs from between Bucky’s, and then they’re body-to-body again, Steve holding both of Bucky’s wrists. Letting go of the right to smooth back Bucky’s hair. Pressing a kiss to the tip of Bucky’s nose, then biting.

Bucky snaps his teeth at him and smiles. Steve says, “Hey, there.”

“Hey, there.”

“ _Don’t_ break your fall.”

Mercifully, it doesn’t really matter, because when Steve steps further away, he shoves Bucky down sideways, by the left hip and shoulder. He lands in a curl, legs bent to one side and the upper half of his body twisted so that he’s facing the ceiling. Arms akimbo. Steve pulls on his legs so he’s rearranged into lying flat on his back. One leg is sandwiched between both of Steve’s knees. 

Bucky says, “But now you have to look at me suffering.” He grins. “You hate that.”

“Oh, sure. Nothin’ in that for me.”

He slides Bucky’s legs together, so his sore thighs touch, warmed. Weight comes down on his calves, pinning him in place. Flat, solid—Steve’s chest, his arms bracketing Bucky’s thighs. His teeth skim the whipped skin, and he leaves a trail of quick bites, pincer-like, that have Bucky garbling syllables, his dick jerking, his head thrown back even as a muscle in the side of it complains. His wrist, where he landed on it, aches too. Problems for later. Irrelevant.

Steve stops biting. “You’re going to tell me what happens next. While I put my mouth on this.” His hand grips the base of Bucky’s dick, and Bucky instinctively grimaces, even as it’s a relief, to have that control. “You can come whenever you want, as long as your wrap the story up first. Got it?”

“I don’t know if I can, Steve. In case you didn’t. Notice—”

“You’re a fucked out, greedy wreck? What else is new? You can finish. Don’t be stupid.”

“Please just. Remind me where you left off?”

Steve’s started jerking him off, which is _cheating_ ; he’s supposed to be sucking him or Bucky can’t come yet, and it’s an agonizing theft of his breath, but it’s good. If Steve’s really trying to set him up for failure, god bless him and god bless the unpleasant consequences.

“Hey, you want to be a good object for me. I can see that you’re suffering. What do I do about that? I need you to tell me.”

“Oh. Right. Uh.”

“There we go. Be a good boy and help a confused vigilante without a sadistic bone is his body out.” He must be squinting with pleasure at his own joke.

Then his tongue is flat and broad against the side of Bucky’s erection. A little dry, but not very, and when he pulls away, there’s the sound of him working up saliva. He mouths wetly just below the head of his dick, frustrating, embarrassing in how disinterested the motion seems. Mindless as biting his fingernails. It’s not nearly enough to make Bucky lose what small amount of control he has left, but that can’t last for long, so he starts floundering for something to say.

He needs to be an object. Steve doesn’t want to see him suffering. What happens next?

“You, um. You start just trying it out. Doing normal things you might do with anyone else if you weren’t a recluse living alone in a safehouse in the woods with some weird little freak.”

As Steve switches to sliding his mouth down his cock, not sucking just yet, Bucky procures that image. A cabin with bulletproof windows, where Steve’s insisted that he take the bed while he himself sleeps on a folding cot. They make dinner together. Steve smokes while he eats. Bucky is always wearing Steve’s clothes.

“You ask me to hold things for you. I hold the dishes until you’re ready to set the table. You use my back as a surface for writing on. Not all the time, but—You get used to it. You start looking hungrier around me, and—”

Steve sucks at the head of his dick, and stays there, tonguing at his slit, and it’s all Bucky can do to make his hips move side-to-side instead of thrusting up. Steve’s hands come down to hold him still.

“Once you start, I—I need it so bad. More than I did before. I get down on my own to be a footstool for you. When you’re smoking, I open my mouth for the ash. I’m hard all the time and you don’t do anything about it, but you don’t stop. You know you’re doing it and—” He sobs as the hot suction of Steve’s mouth moves lower. “Oh, fuck! You like not giving into me. And you know you won’t touch me until I beg for it. Like I begged to be used.”

He can barely understand his own words anymore, but he trusts Steve to get it even if he can’t understand the words either. The tone and the sobbing are what matter, really. How undone he’s coming beneath Steve’s mouth is what matters, Steve’s teeth skating across his skin so he hisses—

“You tell me we’ll move to a city one day. Far away, where no one will, uh recognize me? I’ll get to have a life. We’ll figure it out together. But—” He’s close, out of his mind, needing to end it, ready to accept that he might fail before he can. “Even if I. Have a job. Or go to the library. When I come home, you’ll still make me hold your book for you while you read. Still make me be a throw rug for you. Still—Holy shit. Still wait for me to beg. And that’s when I do. I beg you to let me. I’ve never done that before.”

It’s not a perfect ending, but it has to be, because all of him is tightening, his balls, his abs, the muscles in his thighs, and he says, “Fuck, Steve, the end. The End.”

But Steve doesn’t take the warning to pull off, instead sucking at the head of Bucky’s dick, and he trembles and whites out as he spills into Steve’s mouth, caught helplessly there. Which means—

Before Bucky can get his breath back, Steve crawls up his body and spits all that come onto his cheek. Some dribbles into his mouth, and he tilts his head to make sure none will drip on the floor.

Steve teases him, “That was quite the work of fiction. You? Never begging before? That was inspired.”

Bucky laughs, hard, almost hysterical. “Shut up. I love you. Christ.” 

“Oh, is that an order?”

“What do you think? No.”

Steve growls thoughtfully. “Still, I’m just saying. I better clean your mouth out.” He pushes more of the come between Bucky’s lips, letting Bucky suck his fingers clean with each portion. It’s salty, thick, and awful, and Bucky feels treasured. An object for keeping on the mantle and dusting twice daily.

His face is clean. He sucks on Steve’s fingers some more anyway, until Steve takes them from him, and he whines at the loss. Steve ignores him and taps him on the right shoulder with the blade-edge of his open hand.

Bucky mumbles, “Might be slow,” but Steve is patient as he forces himself up on one knee, the other knee squared before him. His muscles quiver, but he’s upright.

“Come on, don’t worry,” Steve says. “This’ll only take a moment.” He runs his hand over the electric tape and gauze. “Close your eyes while I take this off.”

Bucky obeys. His neck feels suddenly boneless, like the only thing keeping his head up is Steve’s hands unwinding the whole contraption. The slick sound of tape unsticking from itself. The gauze falls away and leaves him exposed. He says, “Can I open them now?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

He does immediately, prepared to hold his left hand like a visor, but the lights in the room are off. The windows are curtained. The room is a hazy blue-gray. He only has to blink himself back into existence a few times. Steve, hair mussed, bright-eyed and looking quieted, smiles and taps him on the shoulder again. Once he’s relaxed, sitting in a sprawl, Steve drapes the makeshift blindfold over Bucky’s naked and scratched-up thigh.   

Stamped across the bits of gauze uncovered by electric tape is Steve’s dusty shoe-print. Seeing it makes all the buzzing parts of Bucky’s body go still. Hold their breath. He wants to gobble it whole. But instead he winds the blindfold around his right wrist. To stash beneath his floorboards later.

“Holy cow,” Bucky says, and Steve laughs at him.

“No, holy horse. Hang on a second.” He walks to the door, where his sneakers are lined up suspiciously neatly, like he did it to make Bucky happy, and grabs some smaller objects waiting there. He’s moving slowly, worn out too, sweat drying on his shirt.

He comes and sits down next to Bucky, facing the opposite direction, one leg straight out and the other folded in. The small objects are a pack of wet wipes and a bottle of hand sanitizer. He takes Bucky’s right hand and prises his fingers away from the gum. They’ve been like that so long, Bucky forgot that wasn’t his natural state, and now they immediately cramp with the shift.

“Ow,” he says, just to be annoying, and Steve rolls his eyes. He starts working at the gum with a wet wipe, using it to protect his own hand as he peels away as much as he can.

Studying this process, Bucky says, “So we own a sex gym.”

“Actually, we don’t. It’s temporary. I bought it so the community center could have another location. I just wanted the opportunity to hurt you on the padded floors before I tore them out.”

“Much appreciated.”

With the bulk of the gum gone, Steve uses a different wipe to scrub at the remaining tacky traces. “I did have to fix up the hallway first so you wouldn’t skin your knees too bad.” He sighs. “It was a real burden.”

“Yeah, of course. I can imagine.” He breathes in deep, out slow. Watches Steve clean him in small circular motions. When that’s all done, Steve tosses the wipe to the side and picks up the hand sanitizer, but Bucky stops him. “I don’t need that. I’m clean.”

“You sure?”

“What? Of course I am.” He flexes his hand, now smooth and damp. “Clean as a cut, Steve. I _know_ you’re mad about that shit causing stronger strains of—you know.” He waves the hand dismissively. “I don’t need it.”

“That’s big of you, Buck.”

“Well, I’m a huge guy.”

“And yet. You still get _so_ pitiful.” He puts a hand on Bucky’s cheek. Gives him a light slap.

“One of the great wonders of the world, I guess.”

Steve smiles like a wolf. “I’m gonna lie down. You joining me?”

Bucky answers by doing. They both lie staring at the water-damaged ceiling, Steve’s leg thrown over Bucky’s. It occurs to Bucky that he’s only half-dressed. Instead of going after his abandoned pants, he tugs his sweater and undershirt off. Curls his naked body closer to Steve.

Steve’s arm comes down over his chest, and Bucky says, “Mmm.”

Steve says, “So, how was the food?”

Bucky picks up his head and stares at him. “What?”

“I was told this was a cooking show. So tell me, Judge Bucky. How was your food?”

“Oh. Right.” He lets his head thunk down on the floor and laughs, dazed.  “It was _horrible_. It was sharp somehow. I gagged on it. It made fun of me, you know. And now I’m exhausted just from eating. So thank you. I loved it. There were no other competitors and you’re moving on to the next round.”

Steve says “You know, that’s funny. That’s just what I hoped to hear. Can I tell you something?” Bucky shifts his head to look at him, half-smiles and raises an eyebrow for him to go on. “And if you tell me you think this is a bad idea. Well, that matters to me.” He stops there, and pokes at the tender space beneath Bucky’s collarbone. Like pressing on a bruise without a bruise ever having been laid down.

Bucky raises his chest up to indicate that he’ll take more of that if Steve wants, a quiet, sleepy pain, and as Steve does press again, Bucky says, “Do you gotta be so mysterious here? I can prompt you after every sentence if you really want. I do a _great_ overly invested audience member.”

“Fine, no,” Steve says. Bumps his knuckles against Bucky’s collarbone itself. Then against his jaw. Bucky smiles and closes his eyes, turning into the touch. “I’ve been. Thinking of getting out.”

“Of. What. The house?”

“Aren’t I out of the house right now? No.”

“Oh—So you mean. For real.”

Steve licks his lips. Rocks his head on his neck. “You know, I didn’t mean to be Captain America in the first place. I didn’t mean to be Captain America in the second or third place. And now. It’s hard to say if it’s the best thing I could be doing.”

“You don’t do it that much.”

“But enough. Maybe there’s a lot more I could be doing.”

“You consider being a different superhero? You could call yourself Aluminum Man.”

A laugh volcano-bursts out of Steve. “Fuck,” he says, and Bucky starts giggling uncontrollably, Steve joining him, snorting through it. “That’s the dumbest shit you’ve ever said.”

“It’s not! Come on, it’s brilliant. Aluminum Man. Your superpower is wrapping up leftovers.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

 “It takes true genius. Hey. If you want to keep being Captain America, I’ll back you. You want to be Aluminum Man? I’ll back you. If you want to settle down and just make comic books with me and renovate things? I’ll back you. You’re a person. I’ll back you.”  

A disbelieving huff of breath. But in place of an argument, Steve’s knuckles pantomime a fist to Bucky’s nose, and Bucky grins, scrunching up his fake-punched nose, and whispers, “Pow.” Now Steve’s hand lies lazy on his face, covering up a full half of it, rough and warm. “You’re good,” Bucky tells him. “You know that?”

Another huff. “I could be better.”

“Yeah? How do you like trying on that me impersonation for size?”

“That’s not my you impersonation. This is my you impersonation:” He twists so that his face is right alongside Bucky’s, his mouth level with the empty space between Bucky’s ear and shoulder, and he drawls like a radio announcer, “The flowers I passed in a window box today were so goddamn beautiful that I'm gonna get married to them. And now that I’m thinking on it, Steve, light of my life, if we don't watch _Buck Rogers in the 25th Century_ together—”

Bucky covers Steve’s mouth and his own with each of his hands, he’s laughing so hard. Then he says behind his hand, “Oh my god. Shut up. Steve. You’re good. You’re so fucking good and you make me so happy.” He uncovers Steve’s mouth. “Sorry if those are fighting words all of a sudden.”

“ _Fine_. I’m good. What are you gonna do about it?”

“Well, I was planning to take a nap with you on these mats. And, uh. Drink something. Probably.”

“Big plans. There’s a sink we can refill that bottle at.”

“Sure.” He yawns. “But that sounds like a problem for later. After all, someone just beat the shit out of me.”

“You can take more than that and you know it.”  He lifts his arm off of Bucky and puts it around him instead, pulling him in. Bucky kisses him on the neck. Hums against him.

“Yeah, you saw through me. I can take whatever you give.”

There are tripwires and alarms; there’s Steve’s arm protecting him; there’s his own arm protecting Steve. The gym is quiet around them. They’re both able to fall asleep.  

**Author's Note:**

> Steve and Bucky talk through two different fantasies in which Steve rescues Bucky from a man who's brainwashed/hypnotized him into acting as an object for him and been physically and sexually abusing him. Both fantasies culminate in Steve eventually objectifying and hurting Bucky and having sex with him. In the fantasies, Bucky is framed as wanting this from Steve, but if the fantasies were themselves fics, I would still tag the relationship between Fantasy Steve and Fantasy Bucky as dub-con.


End file.
